Constructing a Strauss Trumpet Sonata
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Academy of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- RAM016
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Composition, recording and supporting materials
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This submission is the ninth tranche in my overarching project to create new chamber music for trumpet and piano by engaging critically with historical materials and developing innovative performer-composer collaborations.
While there are well-established performance and compositional traditions in late-Romantic Austro-German trumpet music – including sonatas by Karl Pilss (1936) and Paul Hindemith (1939) – there is an obvious lacuna in the repertoire. Richard Strauss wrote idiomatically and imaginatively for the trumpet in his operas and orchestral music, but didn’t compose a trumpet sonata. This project’s primary research question was how to imagine such a sonata by exploring the susceptibility of Strauss’s music to be adapted and developed for trumpet and piano within the idiomatic context of the late-Romantic sonata.
The complexity of Strauss’s idiolect necessitated the development of a new collaborative model between myself (scholar-performer) and Thomas Oehler (composer). The collaboration was tracked through 44 practical workshops, identifying source materials, experimenting practically with rhetorical gesture, texture and timbre, developing the source materials within a contrapuntal substrate and formal design that are recognisably Straussian, and critiquing each other’s work on the project. Over the course of the workshops, our different perspectives coalesced into a position where we were both co-composers and co-performers.
The three outputs submitted here are of equal significance to the project:
1. A CD released in February 2020 on Linn Records CKD621 (Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet).
2. The score published in June 2020 by Boosey & Hawkes.
3. An article: ‘The Making of a Trumpet Sonata after Richard Strauss’ published online in 2020 by Boosey & Hawkes and Schott-music.com [https://www.boosey.com/downloads/MakingofaTrumpetSonataAfterRichardStrauss.pdf]
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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